Chapter # 6: Assessing Speaking

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 6
"Assessing  Speaking" 

 Speaking is as we know is an important mean of communication in actually all English programs.

According to the teacher,  the curricular program and other aspects, valid assessment should reflect the course objectives.  

Some ways teacher uses to test this skill are:

• Simulation of real-life situations in which students are engage in conversations.
• Develop class discussions and debates.

According to Heaton ( 1995, p.88) the skill of speaking is " an extremely difficult skill to test..."  The greatest challenges are  resource requirements and reliability,  including the perceived subjectivity in grading.

Teachers most of the time after analizing:

1. Lack of time.
2. Number of students.
3. Lack of available tests.
4. Administrative difficulties.

 Reach to the conclusion that they are not even going to think about assessing speaking.

It is important dispate the different situations this assessment might go through, to do the  correct evaluation because, for instance,  in communicative language teaching, speaking is a prominent component of the language curriculum, and on the other side,  English is  consider a global language, it is said that a large percentage of the world's language learners study English in order to develop proficiency in speaking.

According to Canale and Swain ( 1980) there are four competencies underlying speaking ability and they are:

1. Grammatical Competence.
2. Discourse Competence.
3. Sociolinguistic Competence.
4. Strategic Competence.

There are some categories  of oral skills worthy of looking at, they are:

1. Routine Skills ( exchanging information or interacting)
2. Improvisational Skills.

Some special issues in speaking assessment  can be:

1. Develop assessments that test more than one student at a time, giving each student the opportunity to speak individually.
2.  Test formally only few times during a course but use continuos assessment of students during normal classroom activities.

An important consideration when designing speaking assessments is to decide what type of speaking samples to collect from student.  These considerations are divided into:

• Formal Speaking Assessment Techniques which carries a framework for speaking tests following these stages:

1.  Warm up.
2. Level Check.
3. Probe.
4. Wind down .
5. Picture Cue.
6. Prepared Monologue.
7. Role play.
8. Information gap activity.

   

Classroom Speaking Assessment Techniques, they include:

1. Oral presentations.
2. Debate on a controversial topic.
3. Reading aloud.
4. Retelling stories.
5. Verbal Essays.
6. Extemporaneous Speaking.

 General Rubric for Assessing Speaking

Many teachers prefer to use a more general rubric for speaking tasks such as the ones listed above.

Adminsitrative Issues for Assessing Speaking

There are a number of issues that definately take place when assessing students, whether individually or as a group,  therefore, it is recommended to follow this tip:

Select two or three students each class period  and focus on their speaking during class participation. According to Coombe( 2007)  if you do this regularly,  you will be able to track students' progress throughout  the course in a fairly stress-free environment.

 

Chapter # 5: Assessing Listening

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 5
"Assessing Listening"

The assessment of listening abilities is one of the least understood and least developed, yet one of the most important areas of language testing and assessment ( Anderson and Bachman, 2001, p.x.) says Coombe( 2007).  

Everyone knows how important it is to assess the listening skills of our students, nevertheless, sometimes it is difficult to do so because the listening process is internal and not subject to direct study and observation. Now adays,  listening is considered as an active process and a great emphasii is placed on it.

Models of Listening

It is very essential to undertstand the nature of listening and for that reason there are two models in literature that have been identified:

1.  Bottom- Up Processing: Here comprehension occurs when the listener successfully decodes the spoken text. In other words, students take in a word, decode it, and link it with other words to form sentences.

1.  Top-down Listening: Here the listener is directly involved with the constructing meaning from imput. The student uses background knowledge of the context and situation to make sense of what is heard. The recommendation is to assess and teach both.

Approaches to Listening Assessment

Researchers in the educational field had discover that there are three major approachers to  the assessment of listening abilities and they are:

•  Discrete-Point Approach: this approach broke listening into component elements and assessed them separately.
• Integrative Approach: this approach  attempt to assess a learner's  capacity to use many bits( of knowledge of language) at the same time.
• Communicative Approach :the listener here must be able to comprehend the message and then use it in context and there "question formats should be authentic in nature".

Other generalities about assessing listening have to do with:

1. General versus Academic Listening
2. Considerations in Designing Listening Tasks: Here you could analize the background knowledge, Test Content, Texts, Vocabulary, Test Structure, Formats, Item Writing, Timing, Skill Contamination.

Techniques for Assessing Listening Comprehension 

There are different techiniques that are essential to develop good listening comprehension, some are:

• Phonemic Discrimination
• Paraphrase Recognition
• Objective Formats It includes short answer questions, close,dictation.
• Information transfer tasks
• Note - Taking
• Listening Test Delivery
• Recording Voiceovers
• Scoring

Chapter # 4: Assessing Writing

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter4

" Assessing Writing " 

This field has been developed considerable  over the time. Students write on a variety of topics while teachers assessed them monitoring the clarity and organization of their message, this includes also the mechanics ( spelling,  capitalization, and punctuation).

It is important to remember that good writing skills are highly sought by hiher education institutions and employers.

Approaches to Writing Assessment

In literature they have discovered that there are two major approaches to writing assessment which are:

1. Indirect Measures of Writing Assessment  it assess correct usage in sentences-level constructions and assess spelling and punctuation via objective formats.  They determine student's knowledge of writing sub-skills such as grammar and sentence construction.

2. Direct Measures of Writing Assessment it assess a student's ability to communicate through the written mode based on the actual production of written texts, also it requires the student to produce the content by finding a way to organize his/her ideas, using appropiate vocabulary,  grammatical conventions and syntax.

Considerations in Designing Writing Assessment Tasks

 

It involves four basic elements

•  Rubric: the instructions
• Prompt: the task
• Expected response: what the teacher intends students to with the task.
• Post- task evaluation: assessing the effectiveness of the writing task.

 Issues in Writing Assessment

1. Time Allacation

2. Process versus product

3. Use of technology

4. Topic Restriction 

Techniques for Assessing Writing

The ESL/EFL literature generally addresses two types of writing-free writng and guided writing. Guided writing,  in contrast,  requires students to manipulate content that is provided in the prompt, usually in the form of a chart or diagram. When refering to this type of writing, the goal is to elicit comparable products from students of different ability levels.

 Different Types of Assessments Include

• Peer Assessment
• Portafolio- Based Assessment
• Marking Procedures for the assessment of writing
• Classroom teacher as Rater
• Multiple Raters
• Responding to Student Writing 

 

Chapter # 3: Assessing Reading

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 3

" Assessing Reading " 

As a teacher you might be facing with the dilemma of testing students'  abilities in reading and listening because we cannot realize what is going on in their minds when they are engage in both skills. During this synopsis you would find current ideas about reading and its subskills as well as strategies for optimal assessment.

According to  Folse (2007) the following are tips that an English Language teacher used with her pupils and have been proved to work effectible, take a look:

•  She covers a range of reading skills  from gist comprehension to scanning for details and inferencing for implied information.
• Shge chooses different text topics and types and uses several passages per test.
• She employs a range of different task types but ensures that students are familiar with them.
• She expects students to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details.
• She asks students to infer the meaning of  unfamiliar words from context.
• She treats grammar as an important part of reading comprehension.
• She tests discourse-level aspects of texts, including text types and  discourse markers.
• She asks students to recognize the  purposes and audiences of texts.
• She encourages critical-thinking skills such as distinguishing fact from opinion.

During our lifetime we encounter lots of reading materials and tasks,  yet it is difficult to define what we mean by reading. Many language teachers now a days agree that reading includes both bottom-pu-skills- recognizing and making sense of letters, words, and sentences- and top-down processing that deals with whole texts. Therefore, reading is regarded said Coombe(2007) as an interactive skill in which the background knowledge that the reader brings to the task is constantly interwoven with the new material.

Since it is not possible to observe reading behavior in a direct manner,  the only thing you get is an idea of how students actually process texts through techniques such as think-aloud prottocols.

There are other important aspects to take into consideration while assessing reading, they are:

* Vocabulary and grammar

*Design taks appropiately according to students needs and level of domain.

*Specifications: which will take in account the content, conditions and the criteria.

*Texts

*Questions

*Formats including multiple choice, True/False, Short answer, sequencing tasks, combination tasks,

Give yourself a chance to identify the potential you have within you by trying this simple considerations.

Chapter # 2: Techniques for Testing

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 2

" Techniques for Testing " 

  

Constructing test items are task filled with challenges for anyone because they are the foundation of tests and the backbone of most assessment instruments, said Hubley (2007).

There are several ways  of classifying  test items, two basi ones are:

* Selection in this case the student selects the correct answer from a number of posibilities. Some examples are: true/false,  multiple choice,  matching, numbering sequence.

* Supply  in this case students must supply or develop the correct answer,  it can be cloze or gap-fill( no response provided), essay questions, short answer or completion.

 In techniques for testing you can also find that there are two types of questions:

Subjetive Questions:  here it requires students to produce longer, more opened responses, therefore,  the  emphasis here is on production.  They are time consuming although.

Objective Questions:  they are usually short answer-closed response items and most of the times it test recognition.They are easy to evaluate.

Multiple Choise Questions:  it takes many forms, but the popular one is the stem and response and usually the stem is written as a question or an incomplete statement.

As like in everything you can find disadvantages in the MCQs  some are:

1.  Do not manage communication.

2.  Encourage guessing.

3.  They are often used to test recognition.

4.  It is a challenging and time comsuming to write plausible distractors and produce good items.

As teachers we must design tests tasks taking into account what was studied in class and the adequation students need, because all are unique and gifted children.

Chapter # 1: The Process of Developing Assessment

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 1

" The Process of Developing Assessment "

Developing assessment might be for some teachers complicated, time consuming and stressing while for others it will mainly be constructing informal assessments for their own classes. However,  if language learners understand the benefits  that this involve,  things will be easy going for them.

Assessment includes six phases  and all six depends on the teaching load or other professional responsabilities,  those phaces  are:

• Planning
• Development
• Administration
• Analysis
• Feedback 
• Reflection 

Like in all that we do, correct planning is essential, and it is also for the correct process of assessment. Several steps are very important in planning assessment according to Coombe( 2008) let us see:

1. Why are you assessing?

2. What is the purpose of this assessment?.

3.  What kind of information do yo need to get from it?

4.  What  abilities do yo want to measure?

5. What kind of mental model do you have of these abilities?.

Another important fact,  said Bachman ( 1996)  is that  teachers need to take the target language  use into account in the initial stages of their assessment planning and choose assessment tasks  that reflect TLU domains in realistic or authentic ways.

There are two modes by which students particularly takes active part as they are assessed, these are:

• Elicitation Modes:  refer to ways in which responses are prompted.
• Response Modes: refer to ways a student can respond to a question.

Since we know that specification is a detailed description of exactly what is being assessed and how it is being done,  as  ELL we should make it our duty to use it because  they provide opportunities  to clarify the assessment decisions.

Constructing the assessment requires maturity,  requires also that the items that was selected be scrutinized and carefully examined by the colleagues, with the intention to better our lanching out and help students to give the highest of their capacity.  Therefore,  it is important to practice with the students, preparing them for the test, be transparent with ourselves as well as with the students.

English viewed as an international language means that we no longer focus on native-speaker standards and imparting cultural information about places where English is the primary language.  Insteadm  our focus is on clear communication in a global context,  so clearly, assessment is a useful tool for evaluating program aims, said Folse( 2008).

Introduction to Issues in Language Assessment and Terminology

Reaction Paper 

By

Licda. Guiselle Weelkly W.

Introduction to Issues in Language Assessment and Terminology

"Good assessment mirrors good teaching-they go hand in hand" said Coombe (2007).

As part of the CONARE-MEP-UCR, english teachers throughout Costa Rica have been taking a training on learning assessment that will give them the faculty to determine how much material the students doesn't know or hasn't yet mastered as well as to guide the teachers to practical ways of assessing their pupils taking into account aspects that we will be mastering throughout each English Language Learner encounter.

As teachers it is important to realize that everyone learns differently, so placing students in the right level of classroom instruction is an essential purpose of assessment, said Coombe (2008).  In addition to that very important point, she adds these guidelines that will be essential to follow as ELL, and they are:

• Apply diagnosys to determine level of domain.
• Identify student's  language proficiency.
• Evaluate students academic performance.

According to Hubley ( 2008 ) teachers must participate in different assessment activities for accountability purposes,  in other words; "teachers must provide educational authorities with evidence that their intended learning outcomes have been achieved".

 There are three terminologies that as  english language learners we must be familiar with:

1. Evaluation  is all - inclusive and it involves looking all factors that influence the learning process. 
2. Assessment it is concerned with the student and what the student does, you collect information on a learner's  achievement.
3. Testing is the procedure we use to gather information about student's  behavior,  it can be formal or systematic.

As language teachers we must be aware of the types of tests that we will be applying to our students in order to gather information about them.  Children learn in particular ways, as language teachers we are responsable of selecting the proper ones according to the type of group we manage and their necessities.

Types of Test

* Placement       Test

*Aptitude           Test

*Diagnostic        Test 

*Progress           Test 

*Achievement   Test 

*Proficiency      Test 

 

Tests usually are categorized by the point in the instructional period at which they occur, for example: Aptitude, admissions and general proficiency test often take place before or outside of the program.

Placement and diagnostic tests often occur at the start of a program.

The Cornerstones of Testing

In order to  test language at any level it is important that we take into consideration both theory and practice.  According to Folse ( 2008) the nine guiding principles that govern good tests are:

1. Design
2. Development
3. Analysis and usefulness            
4. Validity
5. Reliability
6. Practicality
7. Washback
8. Authenticity
9. Transparency and security.

It has never been easy for  language teachers nor it will be now, but one thing is sure, if the teacher does his or her part faithfully and following good guidelines,  the probability of excellency is sure, indeed.